Beyond CCT: Multi-channel SPD recovery for per-shot camera color correction
Shuwei Yue, Hongke Wei, Qiao Chen
Abstract
Modern cameras correct color via two or three pre-calibrated 3x3 matrices interpolated by Correlated Color Temperature (CCT). This collapses the illuminant SPD to a scalar. LEDs, fluorescents, and mixed sources sit off the Planckian locus, and metameric illuminants with the same chromaticity demand different optimal CCMs that a CCT pipeline cannot distinguish. We recover the illuminant SPD instead using non-negative least squares against a basis dictionary, conditioned on the camera white point and a multi-channel ambient-light sensor (ALS). A closed-form 3x3 CCM is then fit per shot. On a synthetic benchmark of 300 illuminants and 3,100 reflectances, mean angular error drops from 1.89 to 1.20 degrees, with a 1.7x tail reduction on the LED-like off-Planckian group (n=45) where metameric ambiguity is tangible. The gain holds under realistic ALS imperfections and observation noise, and the same off-Planckian advantage carries over to 1,684 real measured SPDs.